


Everything

by ArcticLucie



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Love at First Sight, M/M, POV Daryl, POV Second Person, Pining, Seasons 1-5 in a nutshell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-16 04:25:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3474353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArcticLucie/pseuds/ArcticLucie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl waits for Rick to figure it out.</p><p> <i>The instant you see him, you know. He's it, he's everything. The empty space inside your soul that burns when he looks at you with eyes apologetic.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first attempt at writing in second person. Just experimenting so tell me what you think. Enjoy!

The instant you see him, you know. He's it, he's everything. The empty space inside your soul that burns when he looks at you with eyes apologetic. That's him. The curve of his lips, the perfect angle of his jaw. That's all there ever was. 

You stand over the mutilated corpse of another lost meal while he brings news of your lost brother. Anyone else and they'd be on the floor, bleeding and broken, but not him. The finger on the trigger is just necessity, a hollow threat, because you don't know it yet, he doesn't know it yet, but you're everything. 

He goes back, you follow like you always will. There is no question, no doubt in your mind. And there never will be; against dissent and the dead, the living and the damned. Into hell, into the eye of the storm with him as your anchor as you trace dark red over the floor out a window into hopelessness. Into the void.

That was the string, the single thread tying you to history, to the dock, severed without protest. You become a vessel without a captain, a tiny fucking canoe floating aimlessly on the vast ocean, on a waterworld, following the tide because it's better than being alone. It's better than being without him.

The plan was shot, but that was okay. You stole something else, a place to belong, a place to be useful for the first time in a useless existence. Then, the new plan went to hell. You're not surprised, prepared to enjoy it while it lasted, but even the promise of safety brings death. This also does not surprise you; naivety has never been your friend.

Fighting. Always back to the fight, for your life, for his, through hordes and a list of bad luck that stretches for miles in every direction just like the snarl of stalled cars. But he's there and you're there. For now, that's enough.

A mother wails, her child lost; she slipped through his fingers, but you're the only one who sees. He needs this, to be absolved. That's why you go, into the woods tracking a ghost. An apparition that takes you further from him than you can bear, but he's there when you get back. Clinging to his son, trying desperately to cling to a life that has long since fell through the sieve.

He doesn't see you, but you see him, you see the snake in the weeds bidding his time. You bite your tongue as you tell yourself that he's not yours. But fuck if he isn't. In the end, he is not redeemed, he's only pulled further out to sea, drowning without you. You see it. Why can't he?

You stand idly by as his family crumbles around him only to be replaced by one not of birth but of circumstance. And you're in it, in deep, up to your knees in the muck and the blood of a desolate world. The ache inside you grows as does her belly, a reminder to all of his failures as a husband. 

He grows distant, you grow together. 

Moving, always moving, forward, backward, but the direction is irrelevant. The devil's in the details and you never cared for either. The beauty's in the movement; how you dance without intention, as one, fluid, like the ocean that used to scare you. It's not as big now with him beside you. Not as big since you found home.

Her cry rips through you like a white hot bullet through skin and bone and icy layers that no one had ever penetrated before, shattering you like a pane of glass into nothingness, shards of everything you used to be. You allow this because she's his, she's yours, _she's_ everything.

You hold her while he falls apart, you love her while he grieves for lost love upon a mountain of regrets while in your arms she lingers. He comes around, comes back to life, slowly, even though you know the world is long past waiting.

But you do.

He needs time, needs distance. 

Goddammit, you wait!

Until you can't anymore, until your blood falls back into your veins, into step, a ruined man, deformed by his own hand and skewed by a madman's ideology. And you run. From the doubts that hit you out of nowhere, seeds planted years ago blooming into self-hatred fueled by a past you thought was dead and gone, that you wish could've been truncated instead of your brother's limb.

He let's you go and you think, as you turn your back, that that's it. You're the limb that's being severed. Or rather, it's your heart being removed from your body, scooped out with a rusty nail, because that's the only thing that seems to fit with all of your symptoms.

It was stupid really—you know it, you _knew_ it—to think you could leave him, to think his soul wouldn't be calling to you like a siren in that ocean you had been trying to forget. But it's real again, out here in the expanse, and Merle's not nearly as good of a copilot as you once built him up to be.

You turn your back once again, turn your back on your kin, and for the first time in your life, you know it's okay. He might not be blood but he's family. They all are. But he's so much more, so much better. You see him and you know. You see him and he's _so goddamn close_ to the edge. 

The bolt slices the air on instinct, even your finger's unaware of its action. Everything you need to say is communicated in just one look, one little nod, everything, because you feel him like he's a part of you. Because he always was.

Your family goes to war; your blood goes to death. 

You grieve and you hunt, sustenance and man. He gives it all up for a fleeting chance at peace. _One day,_ you tell yourself, one day he'll see you. You don't believe the lie, but you believe in him. A man teetering on the precipice of righteousness and the fall. And you're prepared to follow him down whichever path he takes.

But of course, _of course,_ peace never lasts. The fences are destroyed, your family torn asunder, pried from your hands by your own inadequacies. You couldn't keep him safe, you couldn't stay away, the hunt not nearly as appealing as the color of his eyes, of that flicker you pray to gods you don't believe in to catch flame. 

Only memory remains, ashen when the past is burnt away. The last innocent thing you cling to is stripped from you soon after, and you're out there all alone with not even so much as driftwood to aid you as you bob like a buoy ready to descend back into the depths of an evil that feels so familiar it sickens you to the core. 

This time, you hear him first, that draw so tightly wound around you that you forget how to breathe. In the dark, he comes in focus, an intoxicating cocktail of cyan and curls. He's there on his knees, gun pointed at his head, and it hurts like its your own soul that gets ripped out by his teeth. 

_Brother._

It settles just under the skin, every syllable a sting more wicked than your ribs, bruised and purple under steel-toed boots, twilight in a shoe print. You see him and you still know, he sees you and he still doesn't.

When you meet up with the others, the reunion's bittersweet because you're all on the run again. Onward to false hope spun from the tongue of a charlatan. But you spot the missing piece of a family still incomplete, and once again, it's taken, she's gone in the span of a flash from the muzzle. 

You're grieving by that barn, the smell of burning turns your gut. The smell of rain soon over takes it, and that barn becomes a sanctuary to your spirit just as much as it has been to you flesh. The fire's burning low when the clatter catches your ear. And that's it. That's all there is. A wall of bodies contorted on the inside while you once again push back against the onslaught of mortality. 

And you know that's all there ever was as he turns his head to meet you. 

You look into his eyes—soaked to the bone with fear and thoughts of how you all will end—and you see it, the revelation, the pain he feels knowing he was too little, too fucking late. In that moment he understands, he gets it, you watch it hit with all the force of the cyclone raging outside. 

And he knows. 

He knows that _you_ are everything.


End file.
